It’s almost that time of year – where retailers offer ridiculous discounts enticing holiday shoppers to buy gifts for their loved ones and themselves. While many will wait with bellies full of Thanksgiving turkey for blow out sales at 12:01AM on Black Friday, more than half of the U.S. consumers will instead search for deals online, scouring the Internet for Cyber Monday deals.

The November 2014 Forrester Research, Inc. Report, US Online Holiday Forecast, 2014 (Access Requires Subscription), states that online sales will reach $89 billion this holiday season. Companies are doing all they can to prepare for the surge in demand and strain to come for both IT departments and inventory. With the recent IPO of Alibaba, retailers, now more than ever, are feeling pressure on their margins and realizing that they’ll need to gain insight about their customers if they hope to be competitive against the Amazons and Alibabas of the world. Companies leveraging scalable and flexible Big Data analytics solutions to gain those insights will be ahead of their peers this holiday season (and beyond).

Pentaho is helping customers such as RichRelevance®, the global leader in omnichannel personalization, and The Lucky Group, a venture backed social commerce company, to prepare for the immense volumes of data associated with Cyber Monday, while providing insight into customers’ behaviors, preferences and needs. By leveraging Pentaho, they are able to use data to deliver something core to their customers that others can’t – personalization.

With a four times surge in both data volumes and internet traffic expected from desktop browsers and mobile shoppers this year, Big Data will be critical for the success, if not survival, of companies big and small.

How is your company leveraging big data to flourish over the holidays?

Our Partner Awards recognize the top achieving partner in the three reseller regions APAC, EMEA and LATAM based on business services, growth and engagement in the local market.

Partners’ contributions from around the globe have been an instrumental part of Pentaho’s 10-year success story. Much more than resellers, our partners are all Pentaho experts, providing the valuable technical and consulting services that ensure each customer project is successful.

Congratulations to each winner for their incredible achievement!

Winners of the Pentaho Regional Partner of the Year Award

APAC Partner of the Year: BizCubed

BizCubed is a long-standing Pentaho partner in Australia and New Zealand. Their Pentaho business has grown very rapidly in the past year, delivering highly successful projects to companies like DeBertoli Wines and Westfield shopping malls. The team has also executed a broad range of marketing activities, which sees them continuing to grow the market “down under”.

EMEA Partner of the Year: BNova

Italy’s BNova has had a banner year, bringing on board several new Pentaho customers and substantially growing its big data business. Big data has now gone from being an emerging trend into an integral part of BNova’s business. Its recent BigDataTech event in Florence was highly successful, with more than 200 delegates keen to learn more about big data solutions.

LATAM Partner of the Year: Oncase

Oncase from Brazil has shown the remarkable ability to expand customer accounts by starting small and proving their worth. This, coupled with the great customer service they provide, has enabled them to significantly build their business in this burgeoning market.

Last week, Pentaho unveiled a Big Data Orchestration Platform instrumental to a data-driven future– one where analytics and data are embedded into the fabric of the organization to drive real time business decisions. Fundamental to Pentaho’s strategy is the concept of governed data delivery – the ability to blend trusted and timely data to power analytics at scale for all users and in all environments.

Today, at Strata + Hadoop World, Pentaho announced new automated data modeling and publishing capabilities to help organizations establish a Streamlined Data Refinery solution architecture – empowering business users while still meeting IT requirements.

Pentaho is putting governed, blended data from across the enterprise at business users’ fingertips. You can watch the video demo here:
Achieving the end result of empowering business users with the ability to blend and refine data for business and regulatory purposes, while supporting IT with governed orchestration processes and data delivery methods.is the basis of a Streamlined Data Refinery Here are two of our customers achieving the business and IT balance.

Tim Garnto, SVP of Product Engineering at edo Interactive explains, “Having lightning fast data analytics is a matter of survival for our team. In early 2013, we hit a wall due in part to the sheer amount of data we could access. We just couldn’t process the data fast enough with our existing SQL database, as a result, we couldn’t get the right offers to the right people quickly enough. Leveraging the Streamlined Data Refinery architecture with Pentaho we were able to extract, integrate and analyze 25 million transactions a day consisting of over 50TB of data. As a result, we cut the processing window from 29 hours to under four all while growing the amount of data processed by 974 percent.”

Robert Clark, VP of Development, 4SightBI shares, “In order for our customer base of agents, brokers, actuaries and managers to deliver quality reports that result in faster sales closings, they require quick turnaround and mobile visibility into the data, without having to wait on IT. With the automation of a Streamlined Data Refinery, our customers planning to use Hadoop will soon be able to see a further reduction in the time it takes for us to produce actionable insights by minimizing time spent on preparing data, all while still delivering relevant data sets with governance.”

In our hyper-competitive global economy, companies are urgently seeking to harness the value from all their data to find new revenue streams, operate more efficiently, deliver outstanding service and minimize risk. They need a platform that catalyzes collaboration between IT and business to meet demands both for governance and the business need for timely, comprehensive data.

Today at PentahoWorld we’ve committed to leading the charge towards a truly data-driven future, starting with governed data delivery.

In his keynote, Pentaho Chairman and CEO, Quentin Gallivan lifted the veil on a big data orchestration platform that will be instrumental in delivering this vision by overcoming three persistent big data challenges: need for strong data governance, diverse data blending, and delivery of analytics embedded at the point of impact. Fundamental to Pentaho’s strategy is the concept of governed data delivery, defined as the ability to blend trusted and timely data to power analytics at scale for all users in all environments.

Also announced today, Pentaho 5.2 includes new innovations to simplify delivery of blended data sets with IT trust, planting new guideposts on the road to governed data delivery.

Automated Streamlined Data Refinery

IT can hand the power of data driven analytics to the business with an automated Streamlined Data Refinery. Hadoop serves as a central processing hub where analytics ready data sets can be blended, refined, auto-modeled, and automatically published directly to analytic data bases like HP Vertica for high performance interactive analytics using Pentaho Analyzer.

Advanced Data Security in Hadoop

Pentaho 5.2 extends the adaptive big data layer with advanced capabilities for Kerberos security support for major Hadoop distributions, including Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR. This ensures that only those users with proper credentials can access Hadoop cluster resources in their data orchestration.

Pentaho 5.2 also includes additional features that simplify the user experience for both embedded and direct customers.

Marist College is a medium-sized school with a Big Data promise – to help all students graduate. The liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York, is taking a data-driven approach to education by utilizing big data and predictive analytics to tackle the degree completion crisis that’s trending in higher education across America. As of January 2014, the percentage of full-time students at four-year institutions who complete a bachelor’s degree in four years is only 37.9%, and the completion rate after six years is only 58.3%. By deploying Pentaho Business Analytics, Marist College has developed a completely open-source “academic early alert” system for identifying students at the start of a course who are at risk to not complete it and then deploying interventions to help those students succeed.

Based on a predictive model, the goal of the Open Academic Analytics Initiative (OAAI) was to create an open model for academic success that all institutions can use, customize and build upon through open-source community collaboration.

Marist hopes this initiative will help advance our general understanding of technology-mediated intervention strategies, and through the leadership of Bill Thirsk, Vice President of IT/CIO at Marist College, the program is already proving beneficial – Marist College’s OAAI can determine at the 75-79% accuracy range how well a student is going to perform in a course within two weeks!

Learn more about how with Pentaho’s solution at Marist College is positively impacting the world of higher education.

Guest blog by Marcos Andersen, Head of IT, SPOTPROMO

I’ve watched PentahoWorld unfold over the last few months, and I see it as a must-attend for companies and professionals who have adopted Pentaho platform. Our impression is that this is a well-organized, truly global event, with users, partners, and experts from several countries, so it will be a great business opportunity to accelerate our knowledge about Pentaho, network with other users, and better understand important use cases.

From a knowledge gathering perspective, it’s a fantastic shortcut to improving our knowledge about the product, attend training sessions, understand the roadmap, and stay on top of business analytics industry trends. It will help us understand where we should be going in the middle-to-long term with Pentaho and inform our business analytics strategy overall. Its a great opportunity that we haven’t seen before in Latin America – so the trip from Brazil was a quick and logical decision for us.

Networking is also extremely important to us. We want to share our experiences with other customers, partners and sponsors. The opportunity to meet with the Pentaho team and build relationships across a cross functional group of people (Sales, Engineering, Marketing) will help our Pentaho relationship for years to come.

And of course, the sessions. I’m personally most keen to see the product test drive sessions on Wednesday focused on Big Data (NoSQL & Hadoop) and the regular sessions on Thursday and Friday covering business/advanced analytics and big data. Last but not least, my team and I look forward to the Pentaho Excellence Awards ceremony during the Friday keynote where SPOTPROMO will receive an award for the ROI category.

(Pentaho note: Need help building your business case for attending PentahoWorld? Check out the blog post from our COO that tells you how to do just that.)

I’m sure you know that three days of immersive learning and hands-on training will improve your effectiveness with the Pentaho Business Analytics Platform – the question is, how do you make the case to your boss and get buy-in from your company to attend PentahoWorld?

In my role as COO at Pentaho, I’m often asked to approve the expense of attending a conference. So, I thought I’d give some insight into what I would look for in a compelling business case to justify the expense – one that I would happily approve.

Sell the outcome, not the cost. Pentaho can reduce the time to design, develop and deploy big data analytics projects 15x faster than other methods. How much is your organization investing in big data integration or analytics projects, and how much would it save (or what else could you accomplish) if you could speed that deployment up by 15x?

Future-proof your organization. Pentaho’s ability to connect to all data sources, then blend and analyze that data is a killer advantage, but do you know how to take full advantage? Come to PentahoWorld to learn from Pentaho product and solution experts, fellow customers and partners. Ensure your company can scale and grow into 2015.

Optimize your data investment. Pentaho can help you make the most of the data investments your company has made to date. Attendance at PentahoWorld will ensure you learn best practices to effectively access, blend and analyze that data, and deliver it to the right people for decision-making. Come to PentahoWorld for practical advice on how to dramatically improve your data ROI.

Sheer information density. You won’t find another opportunity to interact with as many Pentaho product experts, customers, and industry leaders doing innovative things with big data, embedded and business analytics and data integration. Our agenda is packed with rich information and hands-on training to accelerate every aspect of your data and analytics projects. Content covers everything from best practices to our strategic vision and product roadmaps.

Cost-effective location. Simply put, Orlando is a less expensive location than many other cities where technology conferences take place, especially once you factor in the discounted hotel rates we’ve secured for PentahoWorld (expires Sept 22). If you’re going to make a cost-effective investment in your data and analytics capabilities, this is the one to pick.

Once you have these five points covered, make sure to take a close look at our session agenda. You’ll find many sessions that likely align with strategic initiatives your company is currently working on or planning to in the near future. I suggest mapping out which sessions you plan to attend and what company initiatives you expect to impact by attending the Conference. When you have a conversation with your boss about attending PentahoWorld, you’ll be able to paint a complete picture of how this will help the company.